“Armitage” messes with your head.

But confusion is not the goal of the play — entertainment is.

The audience will be transported to another time, but it may not know what time that is.

The characters, time span and plot are wide-ranging, but one thing is common through all of it: drama.

“Armitage,” which follows the course of a single family across several decades during the nineteenth century, isn’t just complex to be complex. It's complexity also aims to please. ALLISON LOVE/Staff

“It’s a Gothic tale of love and romance and sex and desire and mistaken intentions and mistaken interpretations,” said director and University theater professor Kristin Kundert-Gibbs.

The action of the play is replayed in the memories of a family over a 60-year time period in the early 1800s. The events of the family’s past are uncovered not in a traditional linear fashion, but in a more natural evolution of memory and thought.

“I think that makes it more mysterious and adds a lot more layers to the characters,” Kundert-Gibbs said. “People can understand better where they can see things through time simultaneously. It adds more depth of character for the audience.”

“Armitage” follows the life of a complex family who has lived a very dramatic life filled with high emotions, but the play also incorporates the surrounding history into the personal lives of the characters.

“It’s a captivating story — it’s lots of really interesting stories,” said Tressa Preston, a graduate student who plays Eva Trelawney. “It’s not really like a lot of other plays. It’s historical fiction and is dealing with a lot of real emotions, and it’s going to be a big departure from a lot of the plays you see being produced.”

Aside from the story, the studio production style of “Armitage” also sets this performance apart from others.

“So it is very minimally produced,” Kundert-Gibbs said. “The cast and crew comes together to create the set, the costumes, the props — everything.”

The location of the performances at the Seney-Stovall Chapel is also a little different from the norm — but fitting none the less.

“The thing that’s exciting to me about doing this at Seney is if you look at the building from the outside, it has a spooky, weird shape and windows in weird places,” Kundert-Gibbs said. “Seney, to me, is just the perfect place to do this.”

The spookiness of the theater lends well to the ghost-like traveling back-and-forth through time in the play; and the ghostly style of action will lend to the all-white costumes.

The spooky story of another time also carries enough mystery to culminate into surprise at its finish.

“It’s a romantic, Gothic ghost kind of story,” Kundert-Gibbs said. “It’s sort of sexy and eerie, and you never know exactly what’s going on, which is a lot of fun in that sense.”

“ARMITAGE”

When: Feb. 7-12 at 8 p.m.; Feb. 12 at 2:30 p.m.

Where: Seney Stovall Chapel

Price: $7 (students), $10